Re: Carrying over ATs from GDM to GNOME session (brainstorm)

[Brian Cameron <Brian Cameron Sun COM>]

Willie/Francesco:

> Yeah!  Thanks for starting this, Franceso.  It is highly needed feature 
> to improve the out-of-the-box experience for GNOME.  If this can be 
> achieved, and we can convince distros to turn a11y on for gdm by 
> default, we can provide an experience that eliminates the need for the 
> user to login, enable a11y, logout, and login again.

Personally, I think that a more serious problem is fixing
gnome-settings-daemon and control-center to allow AT programs to be
easily launched via hotkey and gestures.  Refer here:

  https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=531595
  https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=531596

The ability to "carry-over" AT programs from the login screen to the
user session is not such a needed feature if the user can easily launch
the AT programs once their session starts.  But, for this to work, we
need both keybinding and mouse-gesture mechanisms for launching the
needed AT programs.  As stated in the bug report, it would make the
most sense if this framework worked in both GDM and the user session.
This way the same mechanism for launching AT programs in GDM works
for the user session as well.

Typically users only need to do this sort of boot-strapping on
first-login anyway, since users would typically would configure AT
programs to always launch in their user session on login.  So, after
first login, I am not sure the need to "carry over" AT settings even
makes sense.  Willie also seemed to express concern about this.

It would be nice to eliminate some of the bootstrapping by having AT
programs "carry over" to the user session.  However, many users will
configure the AT programs to meet their own individual needs.  For
example, some users may wish to use onscreen instead of GOK, or vice
versa.  Dealing with the complexities of making AT programs "carry over"
while honoring the users personal preferences seems hard to implement
correctly.

Remember that the login screen has a very simple GUI.  Typically users
only need to be able to enter their username and password.  So, the
default AT program that gets launched for the login screen may be
sufficient to navigate this screen, but may not be really configured
for the user to navigate their full desktop.  In other words, there is
no real guarantee that the AT program (or how they are configured to
work at login time) makes sense for the normal user session.  This
also complicates things, I think.

Note that this topic was discussed before, in 2007.  A patch for the
old GDM was written that implemented the feature you are describing.

  https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=411501

However, as you can see from the bug comments, the patch was never
really finished, and some of the design issues were never resolved.
It would probably be good to look over that previous work to see
what was done before, and to check if any of the ideas might be
useful in this effort.

Brian